Heritage language syntax: a view from microcontact

Friday 03 December 2021, 12:00 to 13:30
Invité: 
Roberta D’Alessandro (Utrecht)
Organisation: 
Caterina Donati (LLF)
Lieu: 

LLF – Bât. ODG – 5e étage – Salle du conseil (533)

Roberta D’Alessandro (Utrecht)
Heritage language syntax: a view from microcontact

This talk will discuss some of the results of the ERC project Microcontact, involving several Italo-Romance languages in contact with each other. First, some data will be discussed showing that the general laws that are considered valid in driving change in contact do not hold for microcontact. Then, some speculations will be proposed on the role of verb movement to enlarge domains of computation. It will be shown that in heritage varieties where verb movement is lost or weakened, the computational domain is restricted. This situation will be compared to that of the emergence of Old Italian cliticization, which will also be argued to be a domain-delimiting mechanism.